You're wrong, all Source based games by Valve are native (HL2, GMod, TF2 etc), SimCity in this example is also Native. No porting happening at all. StarCraft 2, WoW, to name a few others.

If its native why wasn't SimCity not just released on Mac on launch? Also the games you list are very few, as many are ported as mac's market share is so low, the game developer has better things to worry about then releasing on mac.

I've also read it's a brand new source, not a port or using cider or anything.

I've not been able to run it on Mavericks on OS X, but because I'd bought it, I've been playing it on my Windows PC. Even though my PC is only lowish spec, it runs completely fine and I haven't noticed any bugs, but might not have been playing it enough.

I think the biggest bug bear is the AI seeming to do random stuff. Some people's cities will just stop recycling, their education will reduce (people stop going to university for some reason) and the traffic is bonkers.

Won't really see this until you get a bigger city going, and that'll be a long way off for me seeing as there looks like there is big learning curve!

If its native why wasn't SimCity not just released on Mac on launch? Also the games you list are very few, as many are ported as mac's market share is so low, the game developer has better things to worry about then releasing on mac.

Simple - PC is their primary target and they did it first. Mac has a lot less gamers than PC so it was second platform. And programming for it is way different - everything has to be rewritten using OpenGL instead of DirectX. It takes time so they released Windows version first, so gamers with PCs wouldn't have to wait that long. Honestly I didn't see almost any big game being released for PC and Mac at the same time (with native Mac port, not Cider). I remember Valve doing that with Portal 2 and nothing more (The Sims 3 is using Cider on Mac, so it doesn't count).

I have it installed on Mavericks - however, it has issues on Mavericks (it runs in a small window - not full-screen). I have the default Mavericks driver for my GTX550 Ti (the NVidia Web driver doesn't support Mavericks yet) - at some point, I'll try it on my ML partition.

Also, here's a (welcome) surprise - and likely why server-side saves make sense; your saves are platform-neutral. Despite previous games in the franchise being released for both PC and Mac, their saves were NOT cross-compatible. Server-side saving allows for abstraction - the client OS becomes irrelevant in that sense. I have access to all my cities on both Windows 8.1 and OS X - regardless of where the city began. (Theoretically, it is therefore possible to create a Linux-distro-based, or even UNIX-based, version of the same SimCity. Not saying that EA would dare - however, it could be done.)

Has anyone brought their Windows-started city to a Mac - or an OS X-started city to Windows?

Okay, so I'm using this on a 2010 Mac mini (2.7 GHz i7) with 16GB of RAM & an SSD and this thing can be INCREDIBLY slow. I only have about 60K citizens so far and it is just crawling. Anyone else experiencing this?

Okay, so I'm using this on a 2010 Mac mini (2.7 GHz i7) with 16GB of RAM & an SSD and this thing can be INCREDIBLY slow. I only have about 60K citizens so far and it is just crawling. Anyone else experiencing this?

Nope. I have a city close to 80K citizens and it runs quite well on my MBP.